Monday, December 29, 2014

UPDATE: I had the days wrong. Leadership workshop is Tuesday starting at 8am in Salon H. My Web UI Automation workshop is Wednesday from 8-5 in Guava/Tamarind.
I’m flattered to have been picked up for two workshops and one regular session at CodeMash! It’s going to be great being able to focus on just giving great sessions and not worrying about herding various cats around.
Tuesday I’m giving an all-day workshop on web UI test automation. We’ll dive deep into working with Selenium WebDriver, but the concepts will cover plenty of other toolsets. I’ll likely spend a bit of time showing how a commercial tool like Telerik Test Studio fits in to things.
Wednesday I’ve been asked to do a half-day workshop on leadership. That’s incredibly flattering! I’m basing the content for that off my Leadership 101 series, plus the book I’ve just started The Leadership Journey. This brand-new workshop will be very interactive with a good number of exercises meant to help you really dig deep and figure out how to evolve your own leadership style. I’m pulling this workshop’s content together very quickly, and I’m both excited and terrified.
Thursday I’m in an opening slot at 8am talking again about web UI automation: Ten tricks to help you get the most out of your UI testing. The talk centers on web automation, but it really will help you regardless of what UI tech you’re working with.
Interested? Check the CodeMash schedule for details, or go grab the EventBoard app and get your schedule built up.
Got questions on testing, process, leadership, or something else? Look me up at the conference! I’d love to chat!

I was having a conversation with a few smart folks a couple weeks ago and one of them mentioned a great mindset their organization has: “You broke my code? It’s my fault–I didn’t have the right tests in place.”

Step back and think about for a minute.

This quip really set me back on my heels. If you’ve read anything of mine over the years, you know how I feel about taking responsibility for one’s code and one’s tests. This organization’s mindset of owning the responsibility for bullet-proofing your own code with great tests is terrific.

It’s one thing (a great thing!) to step up to the plate and be serious about getting testing ingrained in your delivery process. It’s a serious elevation to get a mindset where every developer takes it personally when someone else breaks their code.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

When the kind folks at CodeMash asked if I could put together a four hour workshop on Leadership, I figured I’d better get some solid content laid out to make sure the class wasn’t just boring anecdotes of mine. I needed something more focused, and something with some practical put-this-to-use-tomorrow kind of ideas.

Apropos, let me introduce to you The Leadership Journey. This book contains the original Leadership 101 blogposts and will end up with a lot of new content. There will also be practical exercises to help you focus in on a few key things.

What’s the books goal? To help you answer a few key questions:

Do I want to be a leader?

What are my strengths and how can I make the best of them?

What are my weaknesses, and how can I best mitigate them?

How can I make my team be awesome?

I’m publishing the book on LeanPub with a recommended price of $9.49. I hope you’ll have a look at it.

What would you find helpful in your own leadership journey? Leave me feedback here in the comments, or over on the book’s LeanPub page.

I get the point I think Mr. Cooper was trying to make: we need to be able to recover more easily from our mistakes in software. I especially love his point of “without rancor” because we need to be more accepting of the fact that the path to success is littered with unsuccessful tangents.
However, I’ve got a subtle iteration of his phrase I like better:

Do your best to choose the correct path at the start, but know how to figure out it’s an incorrect path, and figure out how to reverse soonest and without rancor.

I completely agree that we need to get in the business and cultural mindset of being OK with failure/mistakes, getting out of them as quickly as possible, and doing it without rancor.
That said, I’d prefer the subtle difference of emphasizing avoiding those mistakes where possible. We should not, repeat NOT get wrapped up in fear or analysis paralysis blocking us from decisions that might lead to mistakes or failures, but we should be doing enough sanity checking to ensure the choice meets business value requirements, fits the teams’ ability to deliver, etc.
In my Leadership 101 talk I make the differentiation between smart mistakes and dumb mistakes. Smart mistakes are ones made when you’ve been thoughtful about your approach. Dumb mistakes are when you dive in to dig a 14’x8’x18” rain garden pit, then realize you’ve dug it right next to your house’s foundation–not the place you want a lot of water sitting for extended periods. (Ask me how I know about this…)
Backing out from unsuccessful choices is critical. First spend a little time planning to ensure you can avoid as many of those choices as possible.

I've always been more interested in how well someone's going to approach working as part of a team over what classes on compilers they took, or what certifications they've passed.

Technology changes too fast to focus on criteria like "3.6 years working with .NET 4.5" or "Must have graduate degree in artificial intelligence." I'd rather have people on my team who have made some big mistakes, learned from them, and want to share that knowledge with the rest of their team.

Do your hiring criteria look like shopping lists in the technology buffet? Perhaps you might reconsider reworking those around criteria that focus on your organization's real needs: candidates who can help you quickly and effectively solve problems core to your business needs.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Last week I parted ways with Falafel Software. They’re a
great bunch of folks, but we weren’t a good match culturally or philosophically.
That’s absolutely OK, and we parted on good terms. I’m happy to continue
recommending them and calling them friends.

That means, however, that I’m open and available for new
opportunities! I’m actively looking for work as an independent consultant, or for
any full-time spots where organizations think I might be helpful.

What sort of things can I help you with? I’m passionate
about helping organizations deliver great value to their customers, regardless
of whether those customers are external or internal. I’ve helped teams build
out their testing skills (not just test automation, but overall testing),
smooth out quality issues impacting their organizations, and cut out waste
throughout their delivery cycle.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Problem: Attempting to publish an app from Xamarin Studio to an iOS 8.x device fails. You may see various error messages about unable to write/find Manifest.plist, and you'll likely see an error message akin to AMDeviceSecureInstallApplicationBundle returned: 0xe8000097 (kAMDInstallProhibitedError).

Solution (mine, at least): Ensure the restriction for Installing Apps is active, not disabled. Under settings, check General | Restrictions | and ensure Installing Apps is allowed.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

I'm giving my talk OMG! This Codebase Sucks! which tries to lay out some ideas to help people fix up problematic codebases while continuing to deliver value via new features, bugfixes, etc. My goal for the talk is to help attendees learn how to decide which parts of the system and environment to focus on, and how to figure out which sections of the codebase to start tearing apart or outright burning down and rebuilding.

All of this has to be done in the context of keeping the system in a state where the team can continue to ship on a regular, if occasionally slightly interrupted, pace. After all, accomplishing the organization's mission doesn't miraculously stop for months so you can focus all your delivery efforts on completely re-writing a codebase! (Occasionally it does, but rarely.)

If you've been around legacy software and struggled through this, then I'd encourage you to attend the talk. You might learn a helpful hint or two, and just as importantly, you might be able to share a gem or three with the other attendees. (Yes, I love interactive audiences in my talks!)

Why ThatConference?

If you're unfamiliar with ThatConference, I encourage you to have a look at it. It's a community-spawned conference that rivals many commercial "big" conferences for content. Moreover, ThatConference (and CodeMash) has an amazing amount of hallway interaction between really smart, passionate folks from widely differing domains. You're able to learn how people from Ruby, Java, .NET, JavaScript, and other domains solve the same sorts of problems you're running into every. single. day. and you'll learn vastly different approaches which will help you as you move forward in your own domain.

Time's short, but tickets are still available.

Just. Go. Do. It.

Bonus Material

Just like on good movie DVDs, here's some extra content: the deck from my OMG! This Codebase Sucks! talk:

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

State in Tests

Handling "state" of a system for any test automation is an involved process that should evolve as your test suite does. All the same good design/engineering practices that we use for building good software (abstraction, DRY, readability, etc.) should be applied to our test automation suites. Because, you know, test code is production code.
Here are some thoughts on Marc's great set of questions:

What are patterns for creating expected state prior to running browser tests?

"State" is a broad term and many folks may think of different definitions. I think of it as data, environment, configuration. There's a difference between setting up background "state" for a test suite, and having each test set up its prerequisites.
Setting up an environment for a test suite run is a conscious decision based on what's needed for that particular suite to succeed. I regularly use a combination of loading baseline datasets, altering system configuration (turn off CAPTCHA, select a simple text editor, swap mail providers, etc.), and leveraging test-specific libraries, infrastructure, APIs to get the starting environment set up.
Also, it's very, very critical to understand there's a difference between system-wide state (baseline datasets, eg) and state needed for individual tests. No test should ever, ever rely on sharing state with another test. The risk of side effects, especially in distributed/parallel testing scenarios is just too high. You'll regret it if you rely on this. Ask me and Jeremy Miller how we know this.... (ie, school of painfully learned hard knocks.)

Is it appropriate for the browser tests to communicate directly with the database of the system under test, creating state in the same manner that you would in an integration test?

I generally prefer to use the system under test's own APIs to create state for a test. These APIs ensure CRUD operations are obeying the system's own rules for its data. Using APIs means you don't have duplicated logic around CRUD ops for your tests, which is a good thing. This way you're not having to maintain separate helper methods to handle changes when the app's underlying DB structure changes, for example.

How important is it that browser tests be decoupled from the application under test, such that the only thing required to run tests are the tests themselves, which can be pointed at any applicable URL (dev, test, staging)?

There are a couple different aspects to this, IMO. You want your test suite coupled to the application in the sense you need to leverage the system's own APIs for setup, teardown, configuration, and parts of your test oracles[1]. That said, these calls to the system should be abstracted into a set of helper libraries. The tests themselves should never, ever know how to communicate with the system itself.
For example, you don't want individual tests that know how to invoke a web service endpoint to create a new contact in your Customer Relations Management system. If that endpoint changed, you'd have to touch every test that used that endpoint. That's a recipe for a lot of extra scotch consumption.
Instead of telling the system how to do something, tests should tell a helper function/library what they want done. That library in turn knows how to call a stored procedure to create a user. With this approach, no test ever has to be updated if, for example, the system changes from a stored procedure to a web service for creating new contacts.

Write Tests Like You Write Code

I've generalized a number of things in the above thoughts, but the bottom line is this: use the same ideas approaches for your test suites as your production code. Because tests are production code.
[1] For automated tests, an "oracle" or "heuristic" is the final step in your test after you validate the UI is behaving as expected. It's not enough to leave the test off at that point. You need to check the database to ensure items were properly created, updated, or deleted, for example. You might have an oracle that checks the filesystem to ensure a datafile was properly downloaded.

Nested conditionals are awful. Avoid them. Read up on cyclomatic complexity and learn to handle things differently in your code. You’ll be happy you did. (See Chris Missal’s article on Los Techies for some other good discussion.)

I’ve long known the troubles this sort of code causes. I just didn’t know the cool name for it.

The diversity movement, or whatever that movement names itself, is trying to bring some much needed change to our world. Good for them. Some of their leaders have suffered some horrible things in life, and they've got some powerful stuff they're trying to spread awareness of. Good for them too.

That said, I'm incredibly saddened at the venom and bile you've had thrown at you. Too many in the diversity movement have no room for any voices or any views other than exactly what's put forth by those leaders. Ironically, there's no tolerance for diversity of views or voices.

Worse yet, there are some in that movement who explicity want white males to have no voice whatsoever. They'll couch it in fluffy phrases like "people with power should restrict their speaking to amplifying the words of those without" but at the core they're demanding to stereotype and marginalize a group of people while trying to uplift others who've been stereotyped and marginalized. In what twisted universe is that even logical, respectful, or even close to right?

I'm especially saddened with the reaction you received because you made some terrific points which were shouted down or ignored.
Looking to Martin Luther King as a model instead of (literally) screaming profanities at people? How's that wrong?

Emphasizing the need to start early in life and focus on kids? We need more people with your reach talking about this.
Asking people to line up with Hacker School Rules and calling out guys for bad behavior? YES YES YES!

Yes, you should have done a few things better. I do wish you'd referenced Shanley Kane's post from the get-go. It's obvious she gave you some bit of inspiration or motiviation. I really dislike her tone and approach, but I think it's important folks know more about her--even if for no other reason to say "I can't agree with her approach, but there's a few things to be learned."

At the end of the day you were adding your voice and thoughts to raise awareness in a horribly sensitive, messy, human problem area. My good pal Leon Gersing has a number of amazing presentations he's done in front of thousands of people. One of his best thoughts is something in the lines of (paraphrased) "You don't need anyone's permission to do what you feel is right."

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Today the great folks at EuroStar conferences graciously hosted me for a webinar. I walked through my conference session "Four Tips for Web UI Automation.”

EuroStar hosts a post-webex discussion at TestHuddle. You can find discussion around my talk in the appropriate forum there. I'm told a recording of my session will show up at that link shortly as well.

As always, my slides are hosted on SpeakerDeck, but here's this deck embedded.

Monday, March 31, 2014

Today is my first day at Falafel Software. I’m extraordinarily happy to be on board with Lino and his great crew of people!

I’m Falafel’s new Vice President for ALM and Testing. This means I get to focus on things in my wheelhouse: helping organizations and teams improve their processes, not just around testing, but across the entire delivery chain: envisioning, prioritization, building/testing (THEY’RE THE SAME THING), and final delivery.

A major part of my work will continue to be around test automation, but I’ll be broadening out to help teams figure out what tools best meet their needs: WebDriver, TFS, SmartBear, Telerik, etc. And of course, in line with my general philosophy, testing is NOT just about tools. Ergo, I’ll be helping teams understand where automation fits in and doesn’t. I'll be helping teams build up their testing skills, not just automation skills.

This is a great opportunity for me, and I’m thankful to the Falafel team for bringing me on. It’s going to be an exciting role!

(Are you or your organization looking for something alongthe lines I mentioned above? Ping me and let’s see if I can help! Jim AT Falafel.com)

Thursday, January 30, 2014

I spend a lot of time in my day job building up various recordings for videos. Having high-quality sound for videos makes a huge difference with your audience. As a very experienced podcasting pal once told me, “Don’t give them an excuse to turn your stuff off.” He used a word other than “stuff.”

In The Beginning

When I first started out in my evangelism (now developer advocate) role, I used this Logitech H390 headsetfor my recordings. It’s a great headset which does a fine job with audio. The quality was completely acceptable. I still use this headset for all my webinars, webexes, online meetings, Skype calls, etc. It’s comfortable and the inline mute/volume switch is awesome. Plus at $28-ish it’s an insanely great value.

Upgrading

Microphone: The Audio Technica AT2020 USB condenser mic. It’s just plain awesome. Carl Franklin gave this a big thumbs up as he used this extensively in his professional sound studio for years. This mic is roughly $100, but it’s an incredible value. I know folks who are using $300 mics for podcasting/video recording and their audio doesn’t sound any better than what I get out of the AT2020.

The best thing about this mic is its utter elimination of echoes in my recording room. My home office is a small room with extremely nasty echoes from the hard plaster walls. With earlier recording devices I’d tried all kinds of workarounds, including (honestly!) recording while hiding under a blanket draped over my workstation. The AT2020 scoffs at echoes in my office and gives me great, clean sound.

Boom: You know you want more boom in your life. Get some. A mic boom helps isolate the mic from noises and vibration, and it’s great for swiveling around so I can record while futzing around between different systems and sitting positions. It’s surprising how big a difference this “simple” gadget made. This one’s a Rhode PSA1, and it comes with a couple different mounting options: a clamp for your desk and also a more permanent threaded nut/bolt arrangement if you have a hole available in your table. (Or pull out a drill…)

An additional benefit from the boom: I can swivel the mic down enough to get nice recordings from my acoustic guitar. (No, I am not sharing those! )

Pop Filter: I got one because I see all the cool-looking videos of recording artists and actors in ADR. OK, actually I got this Nady 6” pop filter because they really do help out with eliminating harsh sounds while you’re talking. I’m not sure how it works; I just know it does.

This clamps on the boom and has a nice flexible arm to position it around. I found the filter arm tends to droop a bit, so I use a small velcro strap to help hold it in place.

Putting It All Together

I tried getting a shot of my setup in the home office, but I couldn’t get anything I was satisfied with. (And I actually even cleaned my desk.) All this stuff goes together quite easily, and the swivel lets me keep the gear out of my way when I’m not recording.

You’ll spend a couple hundred dollars on all the gear above, but it’s really worth it if you want to step up the quality of audio you’re creating.

Monday, January 13, 2014

After eight amazing years it’s time for me to step aside from CodeMash and let others bring new vision and energy to CodeMash. As of last Friday I’m no longer the President of the Board. I’ve stepped down, and Brian Prince is taking over.

It’s been eight wonderful years of working with amazing, tiny crew. We started off year zero of CodeMash with something around 220 attendees, speakers, and staff. I used “Almost 300 attendees!” as marketing schtick when trying to pimp the next year.

Oh how we’ve grown!

This year we had 220 family members signed up—the same amount as the first year’s total attendance! KidzMash (something I dreamed up with Jason Gilmore while on a short phone call during one of my long commutes) has grown to the point where they need two rooms and were nearly overflowing during the raffle.

This year there were roughly 2,000 attendees, speakers, and staff in attendance, and Jon Skeet’s morning talk in the main ballroom had more folks than either of our first two conferences!

CodeMash has been an incredible success for many, many reasons:

An wonderful venue whose staff are truly partners, and have become part of the CodeMash family

A tiny core of five to eight core organizers who are close friends. We succeed by absolute delegation and total responsibility for owing every detail of execution on our ideas.

A ruthless focus on keeping to our main ideals: kickass content on a broad range of topics. We constantly deflect neat ideas that don’t align with our mission.

Content selection committees that have sifted through hundreds of submissions each year to distill out amazing material. We’ve had between 600 – 800 submissions the last five years and that’s an incredible amount of work and stress to deal with!

World-class speakers who donate their time. (CodeMash’s financial model doesn’t enable us to cover travel expenses or stipends. Speakers are losing money while at CodeMash, although I’m proud that unlike many larger conferences we do cover speakers’ hotel nights.)

CodeMash isn’t unique in those things; however. There are larger conferences that have professional full-time staff. They plan and execute their conferences flawlessly with a great lineup of content presented at cool venues. What makes CodeMash truly different?

THE ATTENDEES.

We’ve been blessed with a core of amazing attendees who bring great passion, true passion unlike the asinine “passion” marketing blabberspeak facile crap, to the conference. Attendees who spend as much time on the couches in the hallways talking in tiny groups as they do in breakout sessions with 120 folks. Attendees who honestly care about productive, not divisive, discussions with geeks who live and breathe in different platforms. Attendees who take what they’ve learned at CodeMash and return to work and life re-energized and willing to try a few new things.

About Me

I'm the owner/principal of Guidepost Systems. I help lots of great folks figure out what works and what doesn't in the world of delivering quality software -- something I'm very passionate about. I'm also a Father trying to remain sane while trying to build great software, herd my kids around, fix school lunches and handle the yardwork. (And roast great coffee!)